Read Ebook: The Garden of God by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere

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Ebook has 1476 lines and 78762 words, and 30 pages

BOOK I

ON THE ISLAND

THE CORMORANT

"No," said Lestrange, "they are dead."

The whale boat and the dinghy lay together, gunnels grinding as they lifted to the swell. Two cable lengths away lay the schooner from which the whale boat had come; beyond and around from sky-line to sky-line the blue Pacific lay desolate beneath the day.

"They are dead."

He was gazing at the forms on the dinghy, the form of a girl with a child embraced in one arm, and a youth. Clasping one another, they seemed asleep.

From where had they drifted? To where were they drifting? God and the sea alone could tell.

A Farallone cormorant, far above, wheeling and slanting on the breeze, had followed the dinghy for hours, held away by the awful and profound knowledge, born of instinct, that one of the castaways was still alive. But it still hung, waiting.

"The child is not dead," said Stanistreet. He had reached forward and, gently separating the forms, had taken the child from the mother's arms. It was warm, it moved, and as he handed it to the steersman, Lestrange, almost upsetting the boat, stood up. He had glimpsed the faces of the dead people. Clasping his head with both hands and staring at the forms before him, mad, distracted by the blow that Fate had suddenly dealt him, his voice rang out across the sea: "My children!"

Stanistreet, the captain of the schooner, Stanistreet, who knew the story of the lost children so well, knelt aghast just in the position in which he had handed the child to the sailor in the stern sheets.

The truth took him by the throat. It must be so. These were no Kanakas drifted to sea; the dinghy alone might have told him that. These were the children they had come in search of, grown, mated and--dead.

His quick sailor's mind reckoned rapidly. The island they were making for in hopes of finding the long-lost ones was close to them; the northward running current would have brought the dinghy; some inexplicable sea chance had drifted them from shore; they were here, come to meet the man who had sought them for years--what a fatality!

Lestrange had sunk as if crushed down by some hand. Taking the girl's arm, he drew it towards him. "Look!" he cried, as if speaking to high heaven. "And my boy--oh, look! Dick--Emmeline--oh, God! My God! Why? Why? Why?"

He dashed his head on the gunnel. Far away above the cormorant watched.

It saw the whale boat making back from the schooner with the dinghy in tow; it saw the forms it hungered for taken on board; it saw the preparations on deck and the bodies of the lost ones committed to the deep. Then, turning with a cry, it drifted on the wind and vanished, like an evil spirit, from the blue.

DAWN

Bowers, the bo'sun, an old British Navy quartermaster, was at the wheel and Stanistreet, the captain, had just come on deck.

"Gentleman goin' on all right, sir?" asked Bowers.

"Mr. Lestrange is still asleep, and thank God for it," said Stanistreet, "and the child's well. It woke and I gave it a pannikin of condensed and water and it's in the starboard after-bunk asleep again."

"I thought the gentleman was dead when you brought him back aboard, sir," said Bowers. "I never did see such a traverse, them pore young things and all; we goin' to hunt for them, as you may say, and them comin' off to meet us like that--why, that dinghy was swep' clean down to the bailer--no oars, nuthin--and what were they doin' with that dinghy? Where'd they get that dinghy from's what I want to know."

"How far's that island from here, sir?" asked Bowers.

"When we struck the dinghy yesterday it was a hundred and fifty south; we're not more than sixty from it now. We'll reach it before noon."

"And them pore things came driftin', father, mother and child, a hundred and fifty mile without bite or sup?"

"God knows," said Stanistreet, "what food they had with them. There was nothing in the boat but a bit of tree branch with a red berry on it."

Bowers spun the wheel and shifted the quid in his mouth.

"And the child stood the batter of the business better than them," said he. "I've known that happen before; kids take a lot of killing as long as the cold don't get at them. They weren't both his children, was they, sir?"

"No," said Stanistreet. "The young fellow was his son, the girl was his niece."

The old quartermaster lay silent for a moment, while in the east a line of turbulent and travelling gold marked the horizon of the lonely sea. The slash of the low wash and the creak of block and cordage remained the only sounds in that world of dawn above which Canopus and the Cross were fading.

There was no morning bank; nothing to mar the splendour of the sunburst across the marching swell; far away a gull had caught it and showed wings of rose and gold against the increasing azure.

In all his time he had never risen to a command or found himself in the after-guard, he was ignorant as the mainmast of literature and art, politics and history, and he signed the pay sheet with a cross; all the same the fate of the children had perhaps made a deeper impression on this amphibian than it had on the more educated Stanistreet; the sight of the girl and her companion brought on board, so young, beautiful--yet dead, like stricken flowers, had given his simple mind a twist from which it had not recovered.

Down in the fo'c'sle, when the matter had been turned over and turned over and discussed, the dinghy had been talked of as much as its occupants. Where had it come from? To what ship had it belonged, and what ship could have set adrift two people like those with scarcely any clothes on? A rum business, surely.

Bowers had contributed scarcely anything to the discussion. It did not seem to interest him.

Stanistreet snuffed out the binnacle light; the day was now strong, the wind tepid, yet fresh from a thousand miles of ocean, bellying the sails, golden in the level sun blaze.

Before going below he came to the after-rail for a moment and stood looking at the swirl of the wake.

The thought of Lestrange was troubling him. Lestrange, since yesterday, had fallen into a sleep profound as though Nature had chloroformed him. As a matter of fact she had, but the cruelty of Nature lies in the fact that she uses her anaesthetics after instead of during the operations performed by Fate. When man can endure no more she puts the sponge to his nose, lest he should die and escape more suffering. Stanistreet was thinking somewhat like that. He was a good-hearted man who had seen more than enough of tragic happenings, and this last business seemed to him beyond the limit. He was telling himself it would have been better to have put a revolver to the head of the man below and have shot him as one does a maimed animal. He frankly dreaded Lestrange's awakening. What would he do, what would he say? Would it be a repetition of the terrible scene of yesterday?

Leaning on the rail, he spat at the gold-tinged foam as though to get some bitter taste from his mouth.

Then came the thought, had he done right in holding on south for the island since yesterday? What would be the effect on Lestrange of the traces surely left there by the children?

He was thinking this when from below came a sound, some one was moving about in the saloon, and Stanistreet, taking his courage in both hands, turned to the cabin hatch and went below.

THE VISION

He entered the saloon.

The place was gay with the morning beams shining through the ports and skylight. Lestrange, who had been looking into the starboard after-bunk, turned, and as the two men came face to face, Stanistreet saw at once that his fears were groundless. Lestrange had quite recovered himself. That was the first impression; then came another--the thin, nervous Lestrange, always brooding and dreaming as with the air of one possessed by some pressing anxiety, had become altered. He looked cheerful, younger, no longer anxious.

Stanistreet felt almost shocked for a moment, contrasting the vision of the distraught man of yesterday with the figure before him; but a weight was taken from his mind and the next moment, impulsively, his hand went out to grip the hand of the other.

"We are still keeping south?" said Lestrange.

"Yes," said the captain. "I carried on. I thought it best, but what's your wishes in the matter?"

"South," said Lestrange. "Come up on deck, I want to talk to you."

Stanistreet followed, wondering what was to happen next. There was a contained vivacity in the voice and manner of the other that, to the logical and matter-of-fact mind of the sailor, seemed a portent of troubles to come.

Then he turned and glanced along the deck to where Peterson, one of the hands, had succeeded Bowers at the wheel.

"What is she doing?" asked he.

"Ten knots," replied Stanistreet.

"And the island?"

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